AuthorTopic: Strike The Snow! (Read 9224 times)

When we got our first really serious snowfall this winter (and it was a good one too), the plow crews piled it up in long walls several meters tall and basically stretching all the way from one intersection to the next along the main road here. Apparently, some of the folks living along that road decided that it was easier to dig a path to their house through the snow pile than across it.

I should've taken a picture of that tunnel when it was new. It's still there (I think), but now the snow's gone all grimy and the pile around the tunnel has compacted enough that you can't walk through it without stooping anymore (well, unless you're a kid or a midget, that is). It looks a lot less impressive now than the original elegant archway through a huge white mountain.

Back in college me and some friends made an igloo one day when it snowed about a foot. It was in the middle of the school and fit 7-8 people. Construction was pretty easy. We had half a bookshelf that we packed snow into and compressed into a block. Make sure the back of the bookshelf is sturdy. We dumped the block out of the shelf section and laid them in a circle. Then we put another layer on top of that, and just kept going up, curving in slightly as we went up.

I think there were 5 or so of us, and it only took a couple of hours gathering snow, making and stacking blocks, and finishing the igloo. It was big enough that we could stand up in the middle, and it lasted a really long time, way longer than the rest of the snow around.

If I were doing it again I'd make the entrance tube slightly bigger, since it (and the rest of the structure) shrunk as the ice settled and slowly melted.

If there weren't stone two feet below ground level, I would love to dig it out and start an IRL fort.

Great! What kind of stone?Maybe you should buy picks when the next caravan arrives...Building into stone layers means that you get to smooth it down later on.

Primarily marble/quartz. In fact, I have reason to believe the mountain I live on is primarily quartz, marble, gravel and dirt.I will steal a pick from the elves road construction dwarves that have been sitting in the same place doing nothing for four weeks.